Embodiments of the disclosure relate generally to methods and systems to facilitate information searching and more particularly, to methods and systems for determining a relevance feedback for search results unobtrusively.
At least some known search methodologies and search engines incorporate interactive relevance feedback as a method to improve the relevance of search results. However, interactive relevance feedback is difficult to obtain from users that are more interested in the search at hand than supplying interactive relevance feedback. Users are also reluctant to provide interactive relevance feedback due to the extra demand of time to provide the feedback and the distraction away from the search activity. In some cases, users indicate that providing interactive relevance feedback may affect the search result in an unpredictable way.
Other known systems incorporate the relevance feedback system into the display of the search results. Incremental feedback is a method used in search systems to seamlessly integrate feedback tasks. The users are shown only one document at a time. Users are requested to assess the relevance of the document before being presented another document. Some systems cluster the search results and effectively derive user's search intent without interrupting user search task. These search systems cluster the documents in several topics, and adjust the search terms according to the user's selection of clusters. In this method, the user does not need to explicitly identify their intentions, and their browsing behavior of traversing the document clusters indicates their interest. However, such incremental feedback is inefficient in browsing the results—only one document is presented each time. Also, incremental feedback may perform well when retrieving documents that have very similar contents but does not perform well in retrieving documents that cover several topics. The clustering method only helps to identify the topics the user is interested in, but provides no feedback information for a particular document.
What are needed are methods and systems for search support that can make searches more efficient for responding to requests for information by using knowledge gained unobtrusively by user feedback concerning the relevance of each document in the search results.